My Technology Blog

I decided to purchase a new hard drive to backup my main computer recently, and it looks like the prices of components is really coming down. I ended up getting a 500G Seagate for a little over $100, and you could get 2G of DRAM memory for $50. There was someone else in the store that wanted to upgrade their computer to support HD. They ended up purchasing a motherboard and processor for a little over $100, and could not believe that it was so cheap.

The AMD Intel chip wars have really helped to push computer technology beyond what most people need these days. PCI-e and more integrated chipsets, have also really helped to remove many of the old bottle necks in the PC Architecture. These days, a pretty basic system will be more than enough power for what most people want, and with PCI-e and lots of on board multimedia functions, you get a pretty powerful machine.

Years ago, it always seemed like there was some new application coming out that would require the latest and greatest machine to run. Video editing was one that always seemed to be pushing the limits of the current technology. It used to also seem like new applications and technology would also quickly fill up your current storage solution. I usually build mid range systems these days, and I have not come across any applications in recent years that have required me to upgrade my system.

Hardcore gamers are still going to want to have the best machine available, but if you are building a home PVR, or editing video most new machines are prety good. If you are storing lots of 1080p HD movies on disk, then you could start eating up lots of storage space quickly. Of course at about $200 per Terabyte, and $100 for 4GB of DRAM, storage is not that expensive.

I just created a Bot that takes existing HTML web pages, converts them to Wiki format, and then uploads the new pages to a Mediawiki Site. Instead of writing everything in Perl, I decided to just stick with simple scripts, and use Sed and Curl. It took some time to get all of the formatting correct, but it is now working very well.

The Bot will log in to the Wiki Site, store the cookies, grab HTML pages, convert them to Wiki format, and them upload them to the new Wiki Site. I have managed to update hundreds of pages using the script, and the formatting looks correct on all of the pages that I have checked so far.

It was actually a fun project, and I learned several new concepts in the process. I am going to try to expand on what I have done so far by adapting the script to more advanced applications, and also use it to make batch changes to my existing Wiki sites. It will be nice to have a way to go through, and add new headers and footers to my Mediawiki pages. I have several other ideas in mind, and if anyone has a challenging idea for creating a Bot, I would be interested in hearing about them.

I think the next step will be to make the whole thing more general, since the current script is very much focused on the existing web page format. I suspect that it is relatively difficult to make a Bot to decode any web page. This is because there are so many variations in HTML formatting between web sites that it is difficult to avoid having a few Regular Expression (Regex) characters showing up when you do not want them.

It looks like Mediawiki 1.11 and later versions have a bug, and have broken the previous fixes for clean URLs. If you try to use the new version of Mediawiki with the fixes that used to work with the previous version, you will not be able to log in, or log out. Whenever you click log in, an edit page will be come up for index.php. Obviously, this is not going to work, unless you disable Clean URLs.

The Solution: It turns out that the solution to this problem is to add the following to you LocalSettings.php file.

$wgUsePathInfo = false;

You will also still need to keep your previous settings, such as $wgArticlePath = “/$1″; and your previous RewriteRule. I actually use virtual hosting in Apache, which makes things a little more complicated.

It is surprising that Mediaiki does not make it easier to enable clean URLs, since Wikipedia uses them. Wikipedia actually uses the sitename/wiki/Main_Page format, but I prefer the sitename/Main_page format.

I was listening to the CEO of Sony talking in Davos last week, and he seemed to indicate that Sony’s strategy to compete with the iPOD was focused on cell phones with Walkman functionality incorporated. It looks like Sony is counting on cells phones to eventually replace iPODs for music. Of course Apple seems to have already realized this, which might be the main reason why they are releasing the iPhone which is focused on the consumer segment of the cell phone market..

The iPhone is definitely a nice consumer product, but Apple has not been focused on penetrating the large corporate market with the iPhone. The corporate or enterprise market is of course the place where Research in Motion is very strong. There has been much written about various cell phone replacing RIM over the years, but they still have an extremely loyal following with business users.

It would be great if Apple and RIM merged together to focus on the cell phone market. Both companies seem to have great industrial design groups, and very loyal followings with their customers. Unlike Nokia, Motorola, or Sony, they do not have a very wide of cell phone products to cover all of the cell phone market. If they were to combine their strengths at this point in time, I am sure that they would be able to fend off their larger competitors and grow their market share in the cell phone market.

I doubt that a merger will ever happen, but if it did it would be interesting to see what products these two companies would come out with.

I have been looking for a good solution for a home media server for some time now, and I have just not been able to find it. The best solution that i could find was a MAC mini, with an external capture adapter like Hauppauge, but it just seemed to defeat the purpose since I would have all of this junk near the T.V. I also want a large amount of storage with RAID, which I also could not get easily with the MAC Mini today. I am not posting this to knock the mini, since it does seem to be one of the better solutions today, and all of the other off the shelf solutions are even more narrowly focused (and limited).

Instead of trying to work with all of the limitations of the existing “media server” solutions, I decided to go back to the drawing board and focus on what I needed first. I thought that by doing this, I could create a check list for everything that I needed, and make it easier to find what I really wanted. After going through this exercise, I came up with the following requirements (not in any particular order):

• Lots of storage for digital photos, music, and video.
• RAID5, since I will also use the storage to back up all of the other home computers.
• A direct connection to my home theater.
• 1G wired Ethernet connection.
• Lots of processing power.
• Lots of software included.
• Easy access to the server from any other computer on the network.
• Network security.
• Web based filing system to make it easy to amount a large amount of content.

After looking at the system from the top down, it quickly became apparent that any decent consumer solutions will be several generations away, and if any solutions does exist today, it would be very very expensive. Because of this, I decided to build a Linux based PC media center from scratch, with support for everything that I have listed above. The only problem, is that it is going to be very big and ugly, so I also decided to move the server into the basement below the Living room T.V. That way I could connect it up to the home theater system easily, but not see it, or hear it. Finally, I ran Ethernet cables in the basement to create a second gigabit home network, connected with a 1G Ethernet switch, just for devices connected to the media center.

Once I realized that I could work with a standard Linux system, all of the previous limitations of off the shelf systems were gone. I now have a fairly high end system, that has lots of processing power, storage and memory. I don’t need to worry about the form factor, and there are lots of adapters available for all of the media interfaces. I also have lots of free Linux software to choose from for networking, RAID, and capturing and displaying media.

Right now it is up and running, but still pretty basic. I do have the networking set up, and I can display and capture media on my T.V. using software like VLC, and Kino. I have copied all of my home videos, music, and photos over to the server, and display them on my T.V. which makes it easy to watch old home videos without dragging out the old camcorder and connecting it up. I can also easily access all of this digital information from a Windows laptop that I have, if I am not in the living room.

I will add more details and photos once I get time, and things are more integrated. There are still tons of things that I want to do, but it is just great having a large backup server in the house, and all of my digital content in one place.

Continuing with the theme that small focused web software is better than larger CMS types of software, I decided to try out PHPBB for a small forum that I wanted to add to a mediawiki web site. The main reason that I selected PHPBB was because it seems to be the most common software being used for forums, and it fit in nicely with the LAMP (Linux, Apache, MySQL, PHP) software already running for the Mediawiki server. I had used other Forum software, such as Drupal, and Plone before, and I found PHPBB to be much cleaner, which was another big reason for selecting it. Finally, PHP is free while other packages, such as vBulletin are commercial, and only offer short trial periods.

Like most other packages these days, it installed very easily, and was easy to get up and running. I initially did not configure much, and it was pretty easy to add new forums, and topics. Unfortunately, after having the forum up for one day, it started to get hit with spam postings. I enabled e-mail authentication, which cut down on a large amount of the spam, but I still seem to get a few postings even with the captchas enabled. The amount of spam is probably due to the popularity of PHPBB, and they should really consider implementing spam controls, similar to those found in WordPress.

Another configuration setting that is a must, is to disable automatic pruning. The first few postings to the PHPBB forum started disappearing after a week or so. It turns out that the default setting, is for pruning to automatically delete posts without responses after only one week. I also installed a couple of mods to not display the memberlist, profiles, and groups, to people that are not registered. Installing the mods is usually done manually, and is not as clean as in other packages such as Drupal, Plone, and Mediawiki, but not a big deal.

Besides that it seems to be a very nice fit for a small forum.

Pros

• Free .
• Easy to Install.
• Very clean interface for forums.
• Lots of online support available.

Cons

• PHPBB seems to be a target for spam.
• Some of the default settings.
• Mods and extensions typically require modifying the code, and are very version specific.

I just installed Google Maps on my Blackberry today. It was actually very easy to install, and you jsut need to go to the following link, using the browser on your Blackberry, and install the application. It actually works really well, and you also get the satellite maps too.

http://www.google.com/gmm/index.html

You can also enter driving directions, and then just click the number 3 and on the key pad to move along the different legs of the driving directions. Of course, you still need to kind of know where you are since it does not have GPS, but it could be very handy.

It is also available for the Treo and Windows mobile phones too.

Wordpress Review

In getting up to speed on web server software, and CMS software, I ended up starting with the most full featured, and then worked down to the more specialized software. As you can see in the background below, my original intent was to find a one solution fits all package, but I am starting to come to the conclusion that multiple small specialized packages are better than one large package.

Wordpress is one of these specialized packages, and it is focused on one thing, and that is creating Blogs. All of the extensions, themes and plugins are also focused on Blogs. It is also the reason why I selected Wordpress for this website, which is only going to be a Blog. Compared to the work involved in getting up to speed on Zope, Plone, and Drupal, Wordpress was a breeze.

The one thing that I do not like is the way things are configured in Wordpress via the web interface. For example, when I selcted the option to create pretty URLs for this site, wordpress prompted for a .htaccess file in the main directory with write access. It is not a big deal to work around it, since you don’t really want ot use a .htaccess anyway, and instead modify the Apache config files directly on the server via SSH. It would be nice if there was more information about how to modify things like this on the server, as opposed to using Wordpress to do it.

Pros:

• Typical LAMP (Linux, Apache, MySQL, PHP) installation.
• Great for Blogs.
• Very user friendly.

Cons:

• Most things are intended to be modified via the web interface in Wordpress (this could be a pro for most people).

Background

I have been playing around with different web server software solutions for the past year and a half, and using these packages to create different types of web sites. I have been working with a few people that are trying to do serious work, but it is mostly a hobby. I have not previously invested a large amount of time in any of these solutions, which allows me to be more unbiased, and I am looking at it from from a typical users point of view.

Initially when I started out, I really wanted to pick one very powerful CMS, and then use it for every web site. If there is one thing that I have learned through this whole exercise, is that this is clearly not the way to go. I will get into some of the reasons in a later postings, but a good analogy to why this is not a good idea, would be building an aircraft carrier to go water skiing. It might be possible, and you could do lots of other things too, but it is not very practical.

Zope Plone Review

Zope was the first package that I tried, and it is a very good CMS. From what I had read, it seemed like a very power solution, that could be adapted to multiple applications. I also read the warnings about the steep learning curve, but I didn’t mind investing the since I was hoping that the reward after the fact would be worth the effort involved.

If you want to manage a large amount of documents, and users, then it is a good way to go. It would be a good fit for a company that wanted to share a large amount of documents with their customers. If you want to support things like photo galleries, blogs, and forums, then this is not the way to go. You can do some of these web 2.0 functions, but you will be very limited (see the aircraft carrier comment below).

Pros:

• Very well written code, and good documentation.
• Written in Python (can be a con for some people).
• Very good user management, and access controls.
• Integrated (you do not need to install MySQL, and PHP, since it has its own database)
• Seems to be more secure than other systems like Drupal and Joomla.
• Looks professional.

Cons:

• Very steep learning curve. You will need to dig deep into the ZMI, and DTML to make almost any changes.
• Integrated. I prefer to have a combination of external files, and a standard database.
• Not very user friendly to non technical users.
• Not very good web 2.0 support (blogs, forums,streaming media etc.)

Background

I have been playing around with different web server software solutions for the past year and a half, and using these packages to create different types of web sites. I have been working with a few people that are trying to do serious work, but it is mostly a hobby. I have not previously invested a large amount of time in any of these solutions, which allows me to be more unbiased, and I am looking at it from from a typical users point of view.

Initially when I started out, I really wanted to pick one very powerful CMS, and then use it for every web site. If there is one thing that I have learned through this whole exercise, is that this is clearly not the way to go. I will get into some of the reasons in a later postings, but a good analogy to why this is not a good idea, would be building an aircraft carrier to go water skiing. It might be possible, and you could do lots of other things too, but it is not very practical.

Drupal Review
When I first installed Drupal, it seemed like it was the general purpose CMS that would allow me to create both larger CMS sites, and also smaller Web 2.0 types of sites too. It was relatively easy to get up and running, and it came with built in forums, and a blog. The control over users and postings is not as good as Plone and Zope, but it is not bad, and it is also relatively easy to customize with lots of skins available.

Onced I started moving beyond the the main modules, things started to get more complicated. For example, I needed to recompile php to add GD support for images, and I ran into a bunch of issues getting it to generate the .so files that I needed. I also found the ping module for the blogging tool to be not very useful either.

One important note with respect to all of the above comments, is that I have not tried Joomla yet, which seems to be getting pretty good reviews. It is next on my list of packages to try, but from what I have read, it seems to be very similar to Drupal.

Pros:

• More user friendly than Zope.
• It is a decent compromise between a full blown CMS, and smaller Blog only package like Wordpress.
• Lots of themes, and modules available.
• The basic install includes forums, and a blog.
• Easy to change the look and feel of the site.

Cons:

• The Blog ping module that comes with the installation is not very good.
• There is good documentation available, but it is not always easy to find what you need.
• There are lots of modules, but it is hard to find which one is best, or which ones are the most stable.
• The blog module is not as slick as wordpress (which is what I am using for this site).

Background

I have been playing around with different web server software solutions for the past year and a half, and using these packages to create different types of web sites. I have been working with a few people that are trying to do serious work, but it is mostly a hobby. I have not previously invested a large amount of time in any of these solutions, which allows me to be more unbiased, and I am looking at it from from a typical users point of view.

Initially when I started out, I really wanted to pick one very powerful CMS, and then use it for every web site. If there is one thing that I have learned through this whole exercise, is that this is clearly not the way to go. I will get into some of the reasons in a later postings, but a good analogy to why this is not a good idea, would be building an aircraft carrier to go water skiing. It might be possible, and you could do lots of other things too, but it is not very practical.